Dracula Untold
I’ve watched pretty much every contemporary Dracula film out there and I was really impressed with this one. The plot revolves around Vlad The Impaler and the dark route he chooses to desperately protect his people and loved ones against the invading Turks. The film contains a lot of action but also quieter scenes full of tension which add balance. Although there are many fantasy elements the CGI supports rather than swamps the story.
5/5
Guardians of the Galaxy
A bunch of outcasts band together to save the galaxy, including the wonderfully engaging characters of Groot, a tree like being and Rocket, a man who’s had his brain transplanted (unwillingly, obviously) into a racoon. Stay with me here, this really is a fantastic film full of action and loose-attention-for-a-sec-and-you’ll-miss-them witty one liners. The film doesn’t take much time to establish the characters back stories apart from a few scenes and expositional dialogue but that does help to keep up the fast pacing and leaves room for many sequels of course.
5/5
Maleficent
An origin story about how the ‘evil queen’ of ‘sleeping beauty’ gets so bitter she puts a curse on the kings daughter. You will fall in love with Maleficent, you will hate the double crossing king and you will think his daughter is sweet but really naive. The wings are a character in their own right. A beautifully realised fairytail that is as enchanting as it is twisted.
5/5
That Awkward Moment
A rom-com from three dudes perspectives. It’s a bro-bonding-rom-com I guess. This movie stars Zac Effron but it’s not a typical Zac Effron movie. The laughs, of which there are plenty, come from witty one liners, toilet humour and genuinely funny – rather than overly cringe inducing – awkward moments. This is a great movie to watch with your other half as the women in the film certainly hold their own and the humour stays just on the right side of bad taste. The characters are stereotypes, the player, the serious committed guy and the witty chancer/looser but they do evolve as the film progresses and you can’t help but like them.
5/5
Life After Beth
This is a weird one – well obviously, a poor blokes girlfriend comes back as a zombie – but what I mean is the film doesn’t know what it’s meant to be. The film starts off as a drama then turns into a rather twisted romance before becoming an all out ridiculous zombie comedy. I honestly liked this mash up because it makes you take the lead character Zach seriously and it established that there is some honest love between he and Beth before she goes all psycho and bittey. Aubrey Plaza plays the role of the zombie with manic mood swings perfectly.
4/5
One’s that didn’t make it…
Divergent
A girl learns that she does not fit in with the very narrow stereotypes society separates people into meaning she is ‘divergent’ and therefore a problem to be dealt with. She teams up with other divergent’s to put an end to the oppression. I really liked the premise of this film as it was fresh and interesting but then I actually got quite apathetic during the middle until i didn’t really care how it ended. Read the book instead.
3/5
X-Men Days of Future Past
As with all X-Men films this is a great film if you switch your brain off, otherwise it will just ache trying to make sense of the contrived and nonsensical timelines in the plot. We are going back to how things all started – yet again but this time history will be a little different – yet again!
3/5
Boyhood
They had a chance to tell the stories of four characters, the Mum, the estranged Dad, the son and the daughter over a decade of their lives. The Mum ‘makes poor life choices’ and ends up with two drunk abusive husbands when her original husband (who was was a bit of a looser when younger) is actually a really nice person. The son grows up to be a mumbling teenager who can only express his feelings through taking supposedly profound photographs. That’s it! I kid you not. None of the scenes come to any conclusion rendering most of them meaningless. If it wasn’t for Ethan Hawk as the kids Dad I couldn’t have sat through the 60 minutes that I did – I sort of slowly fast forwarded through each scene after that looking for one that was vaguely eventful. Another thing, we aren’t meant to wonder why two very white looking people with fine features have a very cute but very Latino looking daughter!?
1/5
Vamp It Up 